Graceanna Lewis, Phoenixville, Chester County

It's a weird day in Pennsylvania today; we've all been urged to stay inside as much as possible. The smoke from the Canadian wildfires is affecting the whole state, and I live in the area that's been flagged as code red rather than code orange. I just hope everyone is staying safe. 

I really thought I was coming to the end of my ability to do a different county each week - the fact that I made it all the way to June without repeating one is quite something! But the bff Andrea and I had some free time last Tuesday, so we took a drive to Chester County and I'm now debuting my first marker from that locale. I wasn't able to attend the marker dedication this past weekend for Fighter's Heaven in Schuylkill County (they changed the date to one when I wasn't available), but I'm hoping I might get to take a run up there and get a picture of it fairly soon - it'll depend partly on this smoke situation. So next week you can either anticipate a Schuylkill post or else the first repeat county of 2023.

For this week, we're looking at the interesting life of a Quaker woman who battled both gender discrimination and slavery, while still finding time to make art.

The marker is in the parking lot of the Kimberton
Plant and Garden Center at 2123 Kimberton Road

Our story begins on August 3, 1821, on a Chester County farm in present-day Phoenixville. Graceanna Lewis was the second of the four daughters in a Quaker farm family; her parents were John and Esther (Fussell) Lewis. Her father died when she was only three, leaving her mother to not only fight for the rights to the family estate, which she eventually won, but also to oversee the rearing and education of her four little girls. Fortunately, prior to her marriage, Esther had been a teacher so this wasn't too hard on her. She was skilled in botany, meteorology, and astronomy, and in Graceanna particularly she was able to instill her own love of and fascination for the natural sciences. Esther was also, like many Quakers, militantly anti-slavery, and the Lewis family farm was a stop on the Underground Railroad; this too was something Graceanna learned from her mother. Some of her earliest writings implored fellow Quakers to take up the abolitionist movement, and she and her sisters were actively involved with helping the runaway slaves.

After being taught at home for their first several years, Graceanna and her sisters were educated at the nearby Kimberton Boarding School for Girls, where Graceanna honed her knowledge of the natural sciences and also her skill as a painter. She was particularly adept at painting wild flora and fauna. After graduating in 1842, she moved to the city of York and became a teacher at the boarding school run by her mother's brother, Bartholomew Fussell. A few years later, she relocated to Philadelphia, where she got involved with a group of similarly science-minded Quakers. There she made the acquaintance of John Cassin, a member of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences and one of the country's foremost ornithologists. John took the young woman under his wing - er, no pun intended - and made her his protégée; this enabled her to access the great library of the Academy of Sciences and learn so much more than most women of the time period. John was so impressed with Graceanna that in 1867, he named a bird in her honor - the white-edged oriole, whose scientific name is Icterus graceannae.

Graceanna became a private lecturer on animals, plants, and natural history throughout the city of Philadelphia. In 1868 she published The Natural History of Birds, which she expected would be the first in a series of books that would be her life's work. Unfortunately for her, her beloved mentor John Cassin died the following year, which resulted in her no longer being able to access the library at the Academy of Natural Sciences, nor was she able to become a teacher in her chosen field. Another problem she encountered was that publishers thought her work was both too complex for regular readers but not complex enough for scientists; in particular, her strict Quaker upbringing meant that she didn't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. Later in life she did finally accept some of the concepts, still insisting that evolution was God's design. 

Graceanna never married, but she did adopt a nine-year-old orphan girl named Ellen. To support herself and her daughter, she continued to lecture and also accepted commissions for naturalist artwork. In 1870, she became one of the first three women to be elected to the Academy of Natural Sciences, meaning she could finally access their library on her own merit. In the mid-1870s she moved to Media, to live with her elderly aunt and uncle, where she continued accepting art commissions and giving lectures. She also joined the causes of women's suffrage and temperance, becoming secretary of the Women's Christian Temperance Union of the region. She had great success showing her botanical paintings at Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition in 1876, and also published papers in a number of scientific periodicals.

In the 1880s, Graceanna returned to teaching, taking a post at the Foster School for Girls in Clifton Springs. She wanted to teach at the college level, but she didn't have enough of an education, so she worked to foster the love of science in younger girls instead. After a few years of this she returned to Media, where she lived with an unmarried niece and nephew in a house on Gayley Street. In 1893 she was commissioned to create fifty watercolor illustrations of tree leaves, to be part of the Pennsylvania Forestry Commission's display at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. These garnered high praise from state officials, including the State Forestry Commissioner, and were used again at both the 1901 Pan American Exposition in New York and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The drawing of Graceanna seen at left was published in 1899 in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography; the illustrator is unknown, but the image comes to us courtesy of WikiCommons.

Graceanna's adopted daughter Ellen married well and was always grateful to the woman who had taken her in as a child. She regularly sent her mother money on which to live, meaning that she didn't have to constantly work to support herself, and Graceanna spent summers with her daughter at a house Ellen owned on the beach in Longport, New Jersey. Apart from the summer retreats, she remained in Media with her niece and nephew for the rest of her life.

Graceanna's occupation on the 1900 and 1910 census documents is listed as naturalist. In 1912 she suffered a stroke, and died on February 25th; she is buried in a Quaker cemetery in Media. Many of her writings and drawings are part of her family's collection at Swarthmore College, including an unpublished memoir of her time helping with the Underground Railroad. Her work paved the way for many women in science even today, and helped to open the doors of the Academy of Natural Sciences for all of us.

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Sources and Further Reading:

Rushing, Erin. "Graceanna Lewis: A naturalist and abolitionist." Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, March 22, 2021.

An inventory of the Lewis-Fussell family papers at Swarthmore College

Graceanna Lewis at The History of American Women

Graceanna Lewis at FindAGrave.com

Graceanna Lewis at the Historical Marker Database

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Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.